In the recent post “Creeping onto the ballot,” I made some observations about the redemption narrative so beloved by Americans. It’s a narrative the political campaigns of Eliot Spitzer and Anthony Weiner (and Mark Sanford before them) couldn’t achieve their goals without.

In the post, I made the point that if these men truly wanted redemption, they would “quietly use their training and skills to help people and causes that can’t afford legal representation. Or they’ll shift careers entirely, performing acts of quiet philanthropy. Emphasis on ‘quiet.’” Plainly, they have something else in mind. Something on the order of a Mulligan.

Peggy Noonan’s July 12 piece in The Wall Street Journal added up to a true redemption account. Where I cited a work of fiction called “Magnificent Obsession,” Ms. Noonan opted for a real-life story.

I was dimly aware of the incident in Great Britain that Ms. Noon recounted, though I was quite young when it took place. Later, Al Stewart, a Scots-English singer/songwriter who has a unique fascination with history, wrote a song — a favorite of mine — called “Post World War II Blues,” in which he mentioned the incident:

And one day Macmillan was coming downstairs
A voice in the dark caught him unawares
It was Christine Keeler blowing him a kiss
He said “I never believed it could happen like this”

Ms. Noonan provides the central details on this incident and the redemption narrative that resulted. In 1962, John Profuma, Great Britain’s secretary of state for war and a married man, engaged in a brief affair with a young woman who, it turned out, was associated with a Soviet spy. Word of the affair leaked out, Mr. Profuma tried unsuccessfully to lie his way out of the crisis, and in the end, the conservative government of Harold Macmillan collapsed.

Mr. Profuma was in his late 40s at the time of his downfall, still a capable and vital man. So what did he do with his remaining productive years? Ms. Noonan tells us:

Because Profumo believed in remorse of conscience—because he actually had a conscience—he could absorb what happened and let it change him however it would. In a way what he believed in was reality. He’d done something terrible—to his country, to his friends, to strangers who had to explain the headlines about him to their children.

He never knew political power again. He never asked for it. He did something altogether more confounding.

He did the hardest thing for a political figure. He really went away. He went to a place that helped the poor, a rundown settlement house called Toynbee Hall in the East End of London. There he did social work—actually the scut work of social work, washing dishes and cleaning toilets. He visited prisons for the criminally insane, helped with housing for the poor and worker education.

And it wasn’t for show, wasn’t a step on the way to political redemption. He worked at Toynbee for 40 years.

Can you even begin to picture Eliot Spitzer, Bill Clinton, Anthony Weiner or Mark Sanford living his post-scandal life the way John Profuma did?

Politicians who make mistakes, mistakes that expose their families and bring us all down into the gutter of “sexting” talk, can do something else.

I’m a big believer in redemption. And in the importance of public policy and the public square. Which is precisely why sometimes it is simply time to exit the stage. In due respect for voters and public service, and because politics isn’t everything, already.